Sandys summer soccer team carries lessons right into regular season

Summer leagues are a chance for teams to reconvene for a couple of months, play without pressure and shake the off-season rust. But when it ends, teams usually go back into their slumber, knowing it’ll be a couple more months before they competitively take the field again.

Soccer, though, doesn’t allow any time for cobwebs to form — there’s no layoff. When the summer season ends, the regular season begins, something Sandy is learning to take advantage of.

“More people are coming out to play,” returning varsity player Christian Dominguez says.

Says Wyatt Edwards, “It didn’t use to be as early in the summer. Instead of practices; we just went straight to daily doubles. But now we’re trying to get together and put more effort into becoming a better program.”

This year, the emphasis on summer preparation is as high as ever.

The years of irrelevancy might soon be ending. The majority of the varsity squad returns as juniors, meaning experience and maturity are in place to build on last season’s 4-8 overall record and fifth-place finish in the Northwest Oregon Conference.

“We had a really strong group of sophomores last year that are going to be juniors this year,” coach Garet Luebbert says. “They’re now getting to the point where they can physically play at this level a lot better. They’ve always been some of the better skill players in the program, but now that their physical size and strength and speed is coming along, it’s going to make us a lot better team.”

Luebbert has seen his guys in action a few times this summer, the latest being last Wednesday’s 2-1 loss to the Barlow Bruins. A few nice moves by a forward got the Pioneers on the board first with a goal near the end of the first quarter.

Barlow evened the score with a minute left in the first half. A strong shot from outside the penalty box deflected off the goalie’s hand and into the top shelf.

On the other side of halftime, Barlow took the lead, again on a well-placed shot in the top shelf.

The game wasn’t a perfect reflection of Sandy’s varsity squad, as many of the players in attendance were from other schools.

But there have been roughly 10 varsity players attending summer workouts consistently, and those players have seen how the team has evolved during the offseason.

“We’re more comfortable,” Edwards says. “We know what we’re going to do. We get on each other and help each other out.”

While the players have evolved cohesively, Luebbert has witnessed their talent develop as well.

“When they’re freshmen and sophomores, you have a long way to go with them,” he says. “Sometimes you forget how young they are. Then they come back as juniors and seniors — in almost one year they take a jump. A couple of them have gotten a lot better. It’s always fun to see the kids make progress.”

The team has scheduled a couple more games, including a tournament, before practice for the fall season begins in August.

And like football, the soccer players believe summer training will better equip them for the regular season.

“Football programs put a lot of time and energy into their summers, knowing that’s going to get their teams more prepared for the fall,” Luebbert says. “It’s the same thing for soccer.”

Luebbert adds the only difference is that football doesn’t have club teams, allowing the entire roster attends practices.

“We have a lot of kids who will play on club teams all year round,” he says. “They’re still playing for their teams now but are just finishing up, and then we’ll get them 100 percent of the time.

“The kids who don’t play club soccer, we get pretty consistently. But the ones who do, we miss a little bit. So it’s definitely valuable to get as many as we can out playing together, getting them ready.”